An excellent in-depth analysis of the Christopher Steele Trump dossier. The hole in the middle is the Trump-Putin collusion as there's nothing there, so to pad it out there's plenty on Trump's business dodgy dealings with Russian criminals and this is why Trump does not want an enquiry into it even though it would put the Russiangate scandal to rest as well as arrest leading CIA and FBI agents for treason.

[7/4/09, in a speech criticizing David Vitter, a married Republican Senator from Louisiana who portrayed himself as a "family values" Christian but was forced to admit that he regularly used prostitutes from a service run by a woman known as the "D.C. Madam"] I might not be the epitome of family values. But I can tell you one thing: I wouldn't humiliate my spouse and children like the current Senator has. If that's not against family values, I don't know what is.""

An excellent in-depth analysis of the Christopher Steele Trump dossier. The hole in the middle is the Trump-Putin collusion: there's nothing there, so to pad it out there's plenty about Trump's dodgy business dealings with Russian criminals and this is why Trump does not want an enquiry into it even though it could put the Russiangate scandal to rest as well as arrest leading CIA and FBI agents for treason.

How do you make someone look guilty of something he hasn’t done? You erect a formidable circumstantial case around the big hole in the middle — the hole that, in a normal case, would be filled by evidence that the suspect actually committed the crime. You don’t so much cover the hole as create distractions from it.

The biggest distraction is bad character: You must establish that your suspect is a five-alarm rogue. This is the fun part, the part you can feel righteous about. By the time you’re done, people will want to believe the scoundrel has done whatever he’s charged with. Indeed, if you’re the maestro, you’ve probably even convinced yourself that this sort of morality play is, shall we say, a well-meaning “insurance policy” against the ruinous harm the accused would surely do unless we convicted him of . . . something.

The rest is smoke and mirrors: Unable to demonstrate the actual commission of the offense, you compensate by showing, in dizzying detail, that all the conditions are in place for the crime to have happened just the way you claim it did. This doesn’t actually prove that that our suspect did anything wrong, just that he could have — or as you will call it: Corroboration!

To complete the web of suspicion, we sprinkle in the expert investigator. He has sources. We can’t say who they are, of course — that would be a security breach. But look, this guy is a pro. Not only are his snitches telling him our suspect is guilty; it seems that the sources’ stories get better every time a new detail about our suspect leaks out in the press.

Same here. People who say there is nothing in the dossier are deluding themselves or have an agenda. As far as I know, none of the dossier has been debunked. Zip, nil, nada, nothing. Steele is a very well regarded ex-MI6 guy (though, of course, like the CIA, you are never an ex-MI6 guy, really), and Russia expert. In fact, Fusion are still working on stuff right now. Maybe the dossier will not bring down Trump, but what the dossier has lead to, and/or other stuff that has come out about Trump will. Just the obstruction of justice stuff could be enough to take him down. And, why if none of this is true, are Republicans in scores, jumping ship ie "retiring" at the moment? They know the score, they know that the GOP is going to be decimated this year, through the Trump/Russia stuff, and the ridiculous mean spirited and venal/greedy nonsense they have been trying to get through the senate/congress. And that tax bill. Jesus, they are real pieces of work, the Republicans. I hope they burn in hell for what they have been doing (and I don't even believe in god, ha!!)

I covered the war in El Salvador for five years. It was a peasant uprising by the dispossessed against the 14 ruling families and the handful of American corporations that ran El Salvador as if it was a plantation. Half of the population was landless. Laborers worked as serfs in the coffee plantations, the sugar cane fields and the cotton fields in appalling poverty. Attempts to organize and protest peacefully to combat the huge social inequality were met with violence, including fire from machine guns mounted on the tops of buildings in downtown San Salvador that rained down bullets indiscriminately on crowds of demonstrators. Peasant, labor, church and university leaders were kidnapped by death squads, brutally tortured and murdered, their mutilated bodies often left on roadsides for public view. When I arrived, the death squads were killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month.

An insurgent army arose, the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front (known by the Spanish-language abbreviation FMLN), named for the leader of a peasant uprising in 1932 that was crushed through the slaughter of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, many of them killed in summary executions. The FMLN seized huge parts of the country from the corrupt and demoralized military. In the fall of 1983, the rebels, supplied with weapons from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were on the verge of capturing the country's second largest city. I did not, at first, travel with the army. It was too dangerous. It was far safer to go into combat with the FMLN. Without outside intervention, the rebels would have seized control of El Salvador within months and ousted the oligarchs.

But, far to the north, was a shithole country ruled by a former B-list movie actor who had starred in "Bedtime for Bonzo" and who was in the early stages of dementia. This shithole country, which saw the world in black and white, communist and capitalist, was determined to thwart the aspirations of the poor and the landless. It would not permit the profits of its companies, such as United Fruit, or the power of the pliant oligarch class that did its bidding in El Salvador, to be impeded. It had disdain for the aspirations of the poor, especially the poor of Latin American or Africa, the wretched of the earth, as writer Frantz Fanon called them, people who in the eyes of those who ruled the shithole country should toil in misery all their lives for the oligarchs and the big American companies allied with them. Let the poor, brown and black people go hungry, watch their children die of sickness or be murdered. Power and wealth, those who ruled this shithole country believed, was theirs by divine right. They, as the lords of shithole-dom, were endowed with special attributes. God blessed shithole countries.

Look at the latest movies coming out of the biggest shithole of them all. Hostiles and 12 Strong. Truly schizophrenic. And their wimmin dress in black in solidarity that they shouldn't have to open their legs to appear in such cacka. They are dead souls. Zombie nation.